Illustration: Chris Sharp

In the spring of 1701, a delegation of 40 Indians from Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna Valley rode eastward to Philadelphia, to undertake a singular experiment in tranquillity. They and William Penn, founder of the eponymous colony, signed a treaty declaring that Christians and Indians would “for ever hereafter be as one head & one heart, & live in true Friendship and Amity as one People.”

For more than five decades, natives and settlers coexisted without carnage. The Conestoga Indians, who led the delegation to Philadelphia and numbered several hundred at that time, cherished the treaty. They carried it with them to later conferences that renewed the original covenant. On December 4, 1763, however—in a symbolic end to Penn’s experiment—the treaty was found “among the charred remains of Conestoga Indiantown” after the village was razed by a band of white settlers.

The description is Kevin Kenny’s. The Boston College history professor has written a new book, Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn’s Holy Experiment (Oxford University Press, 2009), about the Quaker-inspired vision of peace that Penn pursued in founding Pennsylvania in 1682.

As Kenny relates, the experiment was flawed from the start. Penn was, after all, a colonialist who coveted Indian land. Being a Quaker and lacking an army that might take land by force, he instead purchased it from the Indians. But after his death in 1718, Penn’s three sons, abandoning the Quaker faith, took over and, increasingly, used fraud and deception to grab Indian lands, turning a blind eye to others who did the same. Settlers—Dutch, German, Irish, and a small number of Quakers—pushed ever westward, provoking the Indian tribes.

Central to Kenny’s investigation is a group of colonists largely overlooked in written histories of that period, the hundred-strong militia called the Paxton Boys, who, in the Indiantown raid, massacred the last Conestoga Indians, by then a dwindling tribe of 20.

In his previous research on popular protest movements, notably the 19th-century “Molly Maguires” of Pennsylvania’s coalfields, Kenny had to contend with the fact that such movements tend not to leave paper trails, an obstacle to any historian. With the Paxton Boys that was not the case, because, unlike the Molly Maguires, they were Protestants (Scotch-Irish Presbyterians) and therefore imbued with a strong tradition of literacy. As Kenny explained in an interview, “You had to be able to read the Bible to be a good Protestant.” In addition, protest movements in the 18th century enjoyed greater legitimacy than later resisters, and thus were less secretive about their actions; in reaching further back in time, Kenny found more rather than fewer original sources. These included letters, pamphlets, and the minutes of legislative debates in Pennsylvania, some of which he accessed through the O’Neill Library’s electronic databases, such as the Evans Collection of Early American Imprints at the American Antiquarian Society.

Among other findings, Kenny uncovered evidence that upends the traditional perception of the Paxton Boys (named after their local Pres-byterian church) as vigilantes. In post-massacre debates in the colonial legislature, as well as the writings of both pro- and anti-Paxton pamphleteers, Kenny found that the colonial government had recruited the militia to defend settlers against hostile Indians—the Iroquois and the Delaware—in the lower Susquehanna Valley, though not with the intention of murdering friendly ones like the Conestogas (the Paxtons, however, made no such distinction). In Kenny’s account, this explains one mystery: why the Paxtons were not brought to justice.

Kenny also set himself the task of uncovering the Native Americans’ side of the story. “We never encounter the Indians speaking in their own voices,” he says, noting that the historical record includes speeches delivered by Indians at peace parleys but that these were translations made on the spot, written down by scribes, and finally published by the state of Pennsylvania in the mid-19th century. In other words, they were third- or fourth-hand sources.

Kenny found some translations more persuasive than others—those that conveyed Indian views of land ownership, for example, and challenged the Western, individualistic understanding. The Indians spoke of land as being commonly held; only its use could be sold. That, says Kenny, explains why the Penn family often repurchased land from Indians, illuminating one more thread of Penn’s “holy experiment” that ultimately unraveled.

Read more by William Bole